5 Proven Strategies to Avoid Fumbles and Flounderings on Facebook Marketing [With Actual Screenshots]
After reading a blog on Understanding and Diagnosing Problems by Farnam Street, I had this urge to recapitulate digital marketing learnings my team and I discovered over the last four (4) months while scaling up our monthly ad spend by over 450X!

Facebook has been a fantastic-yet-black-box channel to provide such huge swathes of user demographics across a multitude of interests and behaviors. Considering it to be your numero uno channel for scaling up digital marketing spends is apropos.
The strategies outlined below remained elusive at the onset but eventually got discovered after going diligently through both good and bad outcomes, focusing on the process to frame the right hypotheses and undergoing several ‘learn-unlearn’ cycles.
Special thanks to Jon Loomer, Adespresso, FB Blueprint team who have put excellent blogs out there. Here’s my attempt at giving back to the community.
1. Enormity Doesn’t Guarantee Conversion
In the initial campaign structure that we decided, we focused on the campaigns with an audience set that had a potential reach of at least 1 Million+ people.

And as you could see, my daily reach in the first 4 days for this campaign was extremely poor and unexpectedly low!

I went through several blogs and understood that I should have indeed focused on estimated daily results. These numbers are fairly accurate and provide a fair estimate of the actual spend. To help reach our daily spend limit, my team adopts the below strategy while preparing ad sets and during daily monitoring.
- Change the bid strategy within the first two days after analyzing the daily spend. Start with Low Cost (No bid caps) to scale up spends and monitor the ads for the first two (2) days. Get a fair understanding of the average CPI and then switch to Cost Cap to receive consistent spends.
- Set the right daily budget depending upon the slope of the budget-to-install line curve. Whenever the spend rate decreases, we increase the daily budget gradually until it reaches the plateau point on the slope.


Focus on the right metric from the beginning. Potential Reach is as much a vanity metric as is DAUs, MAUs. Instead focus on the Estimated Daily volume
2. Ad Relevance Diagnostics — Be data-informed and not data-driven
Ad Relevance Diagnostics is indicative of the performance of your ad set and comprises of three rankings:
- Quality: Talks about the quality of your creative assets. (Quality is a subjective term and
- Engagement Rate: Talks about user intent when they Click, Like, Share, Comments
- Conversion Rate: Talks about post-click user experience or other down-the-funnel conversion events for website or in-app
Depending on your campaign objective, one should take a call whether one meets the minimum threshold for each of the above categories. In my experience, depending on your campaign objectives, one should aim to meet this below minimum threshold for three parameters

To give you an actual example, among the best performing App Install ads, I had the lowest Quality Ranking in almost 40% of such ads. But it doesn’t bother me as long as my spend and CPIs are under control.

3. Increasing Bid Cap or Daily Spend Limit Doesn’t Guarantee More Spend
Apparently, this should come as a rude shock to a lot of young digital marketing managers who have learned this tactic to increase spends quickly. I deployed these specific tactics on certain ad sets as an experiment to boost the reach (and spend, simultaneously) but in vain.


This strategy, albeit widely acclaimed to be a quick panacea for boosting the spend, is not fruitful for certain ad campaigns. Facebook has briefly explained in this article exactly how they put bids and decide winner on the basis of the highest total value.
- Bid: Quite obviously! The amount you’d be ready to spend for each action.
- Estimated Action Rates: An estimate of whether person engages with or converts with your Ad. Here the focus is on engagement ranking + conversion ranking.
- Ad Quality: Determined primarily from the feedback received from people viewing or hiding the ad.
Together, estimated action rates and ad quality measure ad relevance. In fact, we subsidise relevant ads in auctions, so more relevant ads often cost less and see more results. In other words, an ad that’s relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids. ~ Offical FB Blog
4. Good Decisions Don’t Always Have Good Outcomes
Bundling of Interests: In the initial days, I acceded to a rookie move to club multiple interests within one Ad Sets to not just increase my Potential Reach (a vanity metric!) but also lower my CPI (Cost per Install). Although I was able to achieve the latter objective, I failed to drive up the campaign spend and reach significantly.


We quickly changed our course and made the right calls in terms of targeting right user interest mix. Also, this provided quick learning for us to scale the ad budget in the interest groupings that worked great for certain regions and age demographics.
I’d recommend keeping at least 15+ interest groupings (with a maximum of 7–8 interests under each) handy for effective A/B testing. Don’t go too broad (or too niche) in your audience interest-based targeting. You should keep a close eye on the daily reach and cumulative spend for the Ad Sets.
Unbundling of Cities: This was an equally ineffective strategy that we implemented at the onset because we believed that running too many campaigns with overlapping of cities is a zero-sum game.
It was not the right hypotheses, and I learned this after running a few test campaigns in which we bundled a lot of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities randomly. After analyzing the results of the daily campaign spend, it was heartening to see that the total spend was ~10X the cumulative spends of all city-wise campaigns.
After speaking to few Facebook Marketing Partners (FMP), I found them deploying the bundling strategy in their campaign structure.
5. Brace for unexpected Ad Disapprovals (and face 50% dip in daily ad spend)
The algorithm of Facebook has been acutely incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to flagging campaigns and ads for not meeting their Community Standards.
When I faced this issue for the first time, I used to change the ad copy and images completely. This resulted in But over time I found that even edited ads got disapproved with a reason that was so inconsistent and unimaginable. Over time, I started requesting a manual review as the first step.

Despite receiving quick approval from the FB team, I had consistently seen the daily ad spend dropping by 50–60%. And this becomes the local maxima for those ads, thereby hampering the overall campaign spend.
At this point, I realized that having effective disapproved ad mitigation strategies is going to be paramount in the long run. After a lot of iterations, here is the final strategy that I deploy to mitigate low spends after ad disapprovals
- Prepare the campaign with two similar ads (different creative and copy) but making only one active in the first two days.
- After seeing the low spend, we change the bid strategy to drive spend.
- After one ad gets disapproved, the Ad gets disapproved. We place a manual review and simultaneously enable the second ad. It takes one day to increase the spend
- Once the disapproved ads also receive approval, both ads are now helping us reach the daily ad spend limit. FB allocates budget to best performing ads because it finds two contenders and we see the reach and spend finding the right levels

As the Head of Products, I was presented this additional opportunity to build and scale the Digital Marketing function of Kissht.com. After hustling through the last few months, I’d say that it is still Day 1 for my team. We are still discovering the nuances of Facebook marketing and understanding the correlation between different hitherto unknown elements that are at play.
It’s genuinely a mammoth task to gain complete mastery over this platform. However, such challenges have underscored the need for any digital marketer to stay ahead of the curve and constantly question their own assumptions of the efficacy of ‘so-called’ best strategies using data and experiments.
If you need any tips to scale your Facebook Ad budget or have to bounce off a few growth marketing ideas, do get in touch with me on
- Twitter — https://twitter.com/manmeets90
- LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/manmeetsingh2/
- Email — manmeet90@gmail.com
Happy Learning!
